A Lesson from ELI (Education Leadership Institute): work together to bring the arts to all students

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Transcript for ELI in Alabama
Music Credits: Excerpt from "Foreric: piano study" from the album Metascapes, composed and performed by Todd Barton, used courtesy of Valley Productions.
Diana Green: “We had already started some state-wide arts education summits to get people to align efforts. In Alabama, we have an awful lot going on in arts education. We have a lot of very strong people working, we have good partnerships, and a lot of wonderful programs are happening, but it just seemed like we were stuck and not really pushing forward and not really getting the arts as essential into all our schools and we did recognize, even our deputy superintendent at the time had recognized, that the schools that had dropped their arts programs were also the schools that were dropping their graduation rates. And so he firmly believed that we needed to do this.”
Jo Reed: That’s Diana Green: the education program manager for the Alabama State Council on the Arts. She was talking about her state's decision to participate in the Education Leaders Institute, or ELI. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed.
Suppose you were an educator and you wanted to develop support for arts education for every student in your state; that’s pre-k through 12. How would you do it? Well, the National Endowment for the Arts wanted to help answer that question. So to that end, in 2008, the NEA convened the Education Leaders Institute or ELI. What ELI did was to bring together executive-level, cross-sector teams to discuss challenges and opportunities in arts education in their states. Over a five-year period, the NEA hosted teams from 29 states. Eight teams--including one from Alabama-- returned in 2012 to participate in ELI’s Alumni Summit where they could share successes, challenges, and strategies.
Alabama was represented at the ELI summit by two long-time advocates for arts education: Diana Green, who also attended ELI in 2009, and Cathy Gassenheimer. She’s Managing Director of the A+ Education Foundation.
I sat down with Cathy and Diana to find out how ELI helped to frame their thinking about making k-12 arts education available to all Alabama students. Here’s Diana Green:
Diana Green: Honestly, just the process of applying to ELI was hugely impactful for my work and for what I’m trying to do because, if I hadn’t had to put that team together to begin with, the six members, I would never have believed that was possible. So, even before they called and said we would be accepted to go, I had already decided we had our team, we were gonna work whether went to Chicago or not, and, um, I thanked NEA for making that possible for us. So, just putting me in touch with people I would not normally talk to has been probably the biggest impact that ELI has made for us.
Jo Reed: So when you got back to Alabama, what came out of that first ELI for you?
Diana Green: I think the most impactful thing that happened for us was that we have a distance learning program in Alabama called ACCESS. It was designed mostly so that we could get AP courses into our rural areas. But, our deputy superintendent at the time, Tommy Bice and others decided that that might be a first way to approach getting the arts into our rural areas. We had a half credit requirement for arts, but there were a lot of schools that really could not comply with that because they didn’t have arts specialists. So we were able to get a couple of very wonderful teaching artists that we know of that are also very good at curriculum design to design a course and to use Alabama artists. And we have this wonderful survey course which nobody else wanted to teach in the schools because they just want to teach their own art form and this covered all four art forms. It was introductory, but it was not a paper and pencil test kind of course. It was really a course where they looked at art, they analyzed art, and then they created art on their own and had to upload that art for their grade. And we actually got some national recognition. I think there was a publication in the Harvard Review.
Jo Reed: And so, because of that, you were really able to bring in a lot of different artists, as well as the art teacher who designed the course, correct?
Diana Green: That’s correct. We were actually able to use some very famous Alabama artists in the course. The other thing was, some people were afraid we would lose art specialists with that course, because they’d think, “Oh well, we don’t need a specialist in our school.” But it turned out that we were actually able to save some jobs because art specialists who didn’t have enough enrollment could sign up to teach this course long distance and balance out their pay scale so they were able to keep their jobs.
Jo Reed: So it was a win-win-win.
Diana Green: It was.
Jo Reed: Cathy, you were part of the team that went to the ELI Summit in 2012 along with Diana.
Cathy Gassenheimer: It was Diana and me, so I was very fortunate to be able to do that.
Jo Reed: How did you become involved with this initiative? Or maybe we should begin by you telling me about the A+ Education Foundation, which you’ve been involved with for quite some time, since the 90s.
Cathy Gassenheimer: Yes. Well, the A+ Education Partnership is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that we started 23 years ago with the real conviction that a child’s zip code should not be directly impactful for what type of education a child gets. Sadly still, 23 years later, there are some zip codes that we wish that children had greater opportunities. I didn’t grow up in Alabama; I grew up in Texas and arts was very much a part of my life growing up. I had art, music, and chorus; and we even had a strings program at our elementary school. So coming here, it’s not that Alabama doesn’t want arts programs, it’s we are the lowest tax state in the nation. For instance, you could quadruple our property taxes in the state and we would still be lower than any other state. So it’s really almost a Sophie’s choice for superintendents who want to do more arts, but they only have a certain number of resources. Compare and contrast that to the wonderful arts programs and opportunities in Alabama; I know lots of people have probably seen Muscle Shoals, the movie, up in the northwest Alabama. Jazz, music, in Montgomery we’ve got the Alabama Shakespeare Festival which is world class, and you can see absolutely wonderful things and they have a program for schools that enables that. We have great colleges and universities that have arts programs. So there’s a lot to offer, but there’s not yet a direct connect to K-12 arts programs for every child and my philosophy is what a parent that is fortunate to have resources for their child wants for their child, which would be an arts program, should be something that every citizen in Alabama wants for every child in the state.
Jo Reed: Cathy, if I’ve read this correctly, the A+ Education Foundation isn’t necessarily involved with the arts per se. It’s more involved with what works best in a classroom.
Cathy Gassenheimer: Yes and no. Our mother corporation, the non-profit The A+ Education Partnership, actually works primarily in policy and communications. When you think now about our new standards and our new standards are much more rigorous and they encourage students to think out of the box and be creative. Arts is so important. And arts can really engage students. You think about someone that lives in rural Alabama reading Shakespeare, well how does that connect? But if you can bring in the Shakespeare Festival, it’s just amazing what that can do. It can open up their eyes. So we feel like arts is an essential part of anything we do and so we work both to connect educators with resources, but also to advocate for arts education.
Jo Reed: Now the group in Alabama that’s spearheading this initiative was begun by you, Diana: the Arts Education Leadership team.
Diana Green: That’s correct. That’s what we’re calling it right now. It is a task force, it’s a team. It’s actually what we came back from the second ELI Summit with the determination to form a committee or a task force that included a diverse group of stakeholders and not just the choir. And Cathy was actually instrumental in helping me write up a plan and a proposal to Tommy Bice, who is now our superintendent, by the way. We put together a proposal to put this team in place. We feel pretty good about where we are so far with it. It’s just beginning, but we think we may have a chance to make a difference.
Jo Reed: Tell me what the first steps were. What are you working towards?
Diana Green: Okay. Well first of all, our goal was to come up with a comprehensive plan for arts education in the state. This was something my executive director Al Head insisted that we do after going to the last Summit.
Jo Reed: And Al Head is a dear friend of the NEA’s. He actually got a National Heritage award from us.
Diana Green: I have never worked for anyone better actually. But we have had plans for arts education in the past and they’ve been very good plans. They have sat on the shelf. They have not had funding and they have not had implementation, and they have not had follow up. We learned at the Alumni Summit a process called the collective impact process. And we discovered that these initiatives or changes for social change don’t work unless you have measurements and you have a backbone organization that will follow up and keep on top of it. And so we were determined to make that happen. That is our main goal, I would say. We have come up with a mission and four goals to start with for the first year. Our mission is to provide full, and this is important, the words fully funded, high quality arts education for every Alabama student. For the very first time, the Arts Council and the State Department of Education have worked together to build those goals and they are actually tied to some funding for schools and organizations to start experimenting on programs that might work. And we are working hard to develop an evaluation model where we can track the success of those goals. We’re hoping to get that started in June this year.
Jo Reed: Can one of you just give me a few brief words about collective impact and its significance? It’s actually a brand new arts education grant category.
Diana Green: Well, first you have to develop a shared agenda. That’s where I think we’ve been very successful very quickly with our group of people. You need a shared evaluation system; collective impact doesn’t mean that you’re developing something new, but that you are aligning a lot of efforts that you already have, which works really well for us in Alabama, because we have so many really excellent efforts going on. We need to align them and measure their success and their impact and figure out where the gaps are and help fill in the gaps. It’s absolutely essential to have a backbone organization, which should be an organization without their own agenda that can facilitate and make this happen. And Mr. Al Head in the Arts Council has agreed that the Arts Council can be that backbone organization. We think that this is absolutely perfect for us because our mission is to empower others to do good work in the arts. We think it’s a good fit.
Jo Reed: Are you bringing the business community in as well?
Diana Green: Yes. We are actually, for the first time, really listening to that. And we do have someone on our team who’s from Boeing. Yes, we are bringing in business. Tommy Bice, our superintendent, did go around to industry and asked “what are our students in Alabama missing when they get into the workforce?” and he said, overwhelmingly the majority of them would say they are missing intellectual curiosity. And he believes that the arts will support that. And he thinks that that’s why they don’t have it now, because we have been missing it.
Cathy Gassenheimer: And you know, one of the things that I really appreciate is one of the indicators of success that has been identified is students possess the ability, confidence, and persistence to use failure as a tool for problem solving on multiple levels. And I think that directly addresses the concern that Dr. Bice surfaced. I know that I was looking at a competency wheel that Microsoft had developed. And one of the things that they’re looking for their employees to have is the ability to deal with ambiguity. Well, if all students are doing is reading a textbook from the first page to the last page and answering questions at the back of the textbook, they’re certainly not being prepared to deal with ambiguity.
Jo Reed: That is certainly true. I’m sorry, that just makes me so sad, a lack of curiosity overwhelmingly being the biggest issue for students as they enter the workforce. And certainly, I think you’re right, I think the arts can help generate that.
Diana Green: Well. we know that the arts are best at teaching imagination. And we also know that a majority of the parents and people in the United States believe that our kids need to learn how to imagine.
Cathy Gassenheimer: You know, I think the pendulum swings from time to time. I think for a while people were so worried about making sure that kids could read at grade level and that they could calculate math that the pendulum swung too far. And, it really became a type of place for students where you were reading all the time, but maybe not rich literature, or whether you were doing math facts but not seeing the application. Now, with the advent of Project Based Learning and learning across the curriculum, there are such wonderful opportunities. And, you know, lots of teachers are now suggesting that students think like scientists, think like artists, think like historians. And there are so many different connections to different aspects of the art there. So I think in many ways we’re trying to undo best intentions that went a little bit too far. Because obviously we want students to be able to read well and calculate well. But there’s so much more.
Jo Reed: But I think it’s a false dichotomy that it’s an either/or. In fact, you know, being involved with the arts can enhance one’s ability to read.
Cathy Gassenheimer: Absolutely.
Jo Reed: And to read critically.
Cathy Gassenheimer: Oh, absolutely. And I think we too often live in an "either/or" world, when it is actually "both/and." Particularly as we’ve been working with teachers to implement our new college and career ready standards, you talk about integrating fiction with non-fiction, and there are the opportunities to be so creative where, I think if I was teaching history for instance, I would be looking at trends in the past and bringing it forward and then trying to think about how you could connect not just facts, but art, history, a whole variety of things. And so there’s just such a wonderful opportunity here. And this task force really could provide a lot of resources and tools to teachers and to students so they could do it even more effectively.
Jo Reed: And, of course, the arts are wonderful at bringing people together.
Diana Green: We know from the publication Third Space, that Arts Education Partnership I think published over 10 years ago, that the arts actually change the environment in a school. It becomes more democratic, everyone feels they own it, they feel a sense of self-efficacy, everyone becomes involved and everyone is proud of what they’re doing, and it brings their community into the school to see what’s going on and takes the kids out into the community to showcase their work.
Cathy Gassenheimer: And what we’re beginning to realize is sometimes parents will come to school-- the only time they’ll come to school-- is to see their students perform. But it has to be through the arts that they can do that and so it really is exciting to see the opportunities that are coming our way.
Jo Reed: Here’s the thing: because systemic change can be very, very tough, because often organizations can be very territorial, and even when people want to be helpful, this age of expertise means people often operate in silos, with often a different language altogether. How do you go about making that partnership? How do you bring people in to collaborate so that you’re all speaking the same language?
Cathy Gassenheimer: I’ll take a stab at that, this is Cathy. I think that when you look at what the desired outcome is, and I think all of us want good citizens and better people to live in this state, and the arts is so much a part of that. So for our legislators or our policy makers, they want to have the type of environment that attracts industry that will have a good tax base. Parents want their children to not only learn well, but want to come back when they’re adults and stay here. The educators, now with our new standards which are expecting students to read more, write more, speak more, the arts is a critical part; it’s almost a vehicle for that. So, I think it’s what we want for our state and what we want for our children is the unifying thing. And while we may have different approaches and different points of view, we all can agree on that long term goal and desired outcome. And Diana is masterful at playing to different people’s strengths and so she will recruit or involve people and then explain to them the role that they can play and invite them to play that role. And it’s been working very, very well.
Jo Reed: Can you give me a couple of examples of how you might integrate the arts into the standard curriculum?
Cathy Gassenheimer: Well, there’s a whole variety of ways that you can build into that. If you’re trying to study another country, one of the best ways is to look at the arts-- what poetry has been written that might appeal to folks. You know, kids love music, so a lot of teachers now, to introduce poetry, will bring in contemporary lyrics and have the children discuss and analyze that. Or, I walked into a junior high classroom and students-- the teacher was playing music for them, short excerpts. And they had a chart in front, and they were pairs of students. They were to rate how they liked the song on a 1 to 10 basis. And then they did rates and ratios, and they used it with it. It was just the most wonderful, wonderful class. And those kids were engaged, and guess what? They learned rates and ratios.
Diana Green: And they were doing polling. Also, Jo, the highest order of thinking on the pyramid for thinking is now create. So if we teach our kids to create, then we’re doing the deepest thing we can do with them.
Jo Reed: And students are responding very positively to this? Or is there kind of an eye roll, like, “Oh, who wants the arts?”
Diana Green: No, actually we have a collaborating artist program where we go in and we teach the artists and the teachers to come up with a performance task that the students have to accomplish by the end of four weeks. And, we do, we make sure that they address some learning goal. In one school we had a third grade class that needed to learn big idea and details in their reading comprehension. We took in a song writer who taught them that if you want to write a song, really the chorus is the big idea, and the details should be in the verses. So the kids read their stories each week that they had to learn, and they created songs for each story so that by the end they understood how to do big idea and details on their tests. And they loved it. They wanted to be song writers after that.
Jo Reed: That seems like a great illustration of how arts education is embedded in a curriculum.
Diana Green: Absolutely. And the funny thing about it is, when we first went in, there were a couple of artists that were teaching from the community that just didn’t have time to work with us, even though we invited them to. But when we did the showcase, they both came up to me afterwards and said, “Can you teach me to do that?” So it really is a good advocacy tool to show people that the arts belong in school, and that you don’t have to be isolated; that you should be working with the other teachers.
Jo Reed: How is it getting buy-in from teachers? Because teachers are under an amazing amount of stress, and I think we often expect them to solve all the problems of society in their classroom. And sometimes they can just dig in, understandably so. How do you go about getting their buy-in?
Diana Green: We start out by telling them we’re not leaving your curriculum or anything that you’re required to do, we’re just supporting you in what you have to do already. And we show them how it works, we admit that, yes, it might take a little longer the first few times you try it, but once you get it done, the kids will have it, they will remember it, and you won’t have to go back and review. And that’s been the case in almost every school that we’ve gone into with this program. All of the teachers and the principals have said that they can continue to use the process, and that they want it, they want to continue to do it.
Cathy Gassenheimer: And I think the results that they get from their students who come to life and really are happy and talking about how cool that is or what they’re learning: that’s what teachers want. So when they see it’s having that type of impact with their students, they want more.
Diana Green: They’re hungry for doing new things anyway. They’ve been told they have to teach to the test for so long that they’re ready now for something new and different. It’s scary, but the good teachers really want to do it, and good teaching is good teaching. It doesn’t-- I mean, they recognize it.
Jo Reed: You mentioned measurement and you mentioned data. How important is data when we’re talking about arts education?
Diana Green: Well, data is extremely important. We have plenty of data out there nationally that we know we can use to prove that arts education works. I know from a lot of people who, especially in the arts, they’ll resist evaluation because they love the mystery of the arts but, it’s possible to measure anything. We have to find different ways and alternative ways of looking at things rather than just numbers that are bubbled in on a test. I think we need to look at that, too, because I think we will impact that, but there are other things we need to look at, and I think the arts can also help our school system figure out alternative assessments for everything-- portfolio reviews, lots of things artists do all the time that we need to add and look at all of our kids in different ways instead of just one way.
Cathy Gassenheimer: And I think from more traditional data when you look at one of the big gaps, I suspect it’s not just in Alabama, it’s everywhere, is students being able to write effectively across different modes and mediums and so the arts really provides a great opportunity there. Writers workshops, bringing in children’s authors and then at a later stage, adolescent literacy, books that really appeal to students, and so giving them an opportunity to think about writing and doing the visualizing; really thinking about when you’re writing, you’re just not writing a sentence, you’re trying to get people to see something. So you’re scripting. And there’s just so many different ways. And so I think that there could be a hard metric over the years to see what art is doing to improve children’s writing abilities.
Jo Reed: This is an election year, so I’m kinda curious if the change of elected officials has an impact on arts education policy?
Diana Green: Honestly, I think everybody just really wants this to happen, including our legislators. We don’t have legislators that are against arts education. In fact, I think they’re all for it. It’s just a matter of figuring out how.
Jo Reed: And then, that’s really very heartening. Did you have an aha moment either at the Summit or when you came back to Alabama?
Diana Green: There were a number of aha moments I know at the Summit for me was a lot of the reading that we had.
Cathy Gassenheimer: Well, one of the things that struck me, and I’ve been thinking about this a long time, about how you successfully scale and sustain any type of project, and one of the readings we had talked about it’s not about replication, it’s about customization. So that fits exactly with what Diana said is one size doesn’t always fit well. And what’s going to be working well say in Florence may not work as well in Montgomery. We’ve got the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery; we have a rich history both of the Civil War and the civil rights. So that’s something here that we can build on and do some amazing things. So I think, trying to get people to think out of the box, that it’s not always the exact same thing; it’s aiming towards the same results but understanding that there are lots of different ways to get there.
Diana Green: Yeah, and it’s hard because people want you to give them a step-by-step plan, and I don’t have one. I think they have it. We just have to support them in doing what they know works with their kids in their communities.
Jo Reed: You’re empowering them to find their solution.
Diana Green: I hope so. That would be my hope.
Cathy Gassenheimer: And then it sticks, because it’s theirs. It’s not something that’s been imposed on them.
Jo Reed: It comes from within. So you don’t even have to work on buy-in.
Cathy Gassenheimer: That’s right.
Jo Reed: And then finally, what do you see as your next steps?
Diana Green: Get this comprehensive plan on the ground. Hopefully, institutionalizing the process to the point that we don’t lose the backbone organization or the process, but that we keep a nucleus of people behind it so that we can continue to review it, change it when it needs to be changed, and keep measuring it and evaluating it and keep moving forward baby steps. If they have to be baby steps, that’s okay, as long as we’re moving forward.
Jo Reed: It’s a long haul. This is not easy. Systemic change is difficult, and it takes a long, long time.
Diana Green: We think Alabama is poised for it though, right now. We have so many people that really want it, and that are ready to go to bat for it. So we feel a sense of urgency to get it in place now. And we think we’ll do it.
Cathy Gassenheimer: If the economy continues to improve, then I think funding will find its way. In the meantime, it’s a good thing that it’s the arts, because artists and people that love the arts are always creative, and are going to find a way, no matter what. So, sometimes you have to go slow to go fast, to set the foundation, to take those baby steps, but to keep celebrating success and publicizing it. So it’s really incredible that Alabama is where it is now, and so we’re very hopeful that the future will be very bright.
Jo Reed: Right, it’s keeping your eyes on the prize, which I have no doubt you will do. Listen, Cathy, Diana, thank you so much for giving me your time and for coming into the studio. I really do appreciate it.
Diana Green: Thank you.
Cathy Gassenheimer: Thank you.
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That was Diana Green, the education program manager for the Alabama State Council on the Arts. And Cathy Gassenheimer: she’s Managing Director of A+ Education Foundation. They both participated in the ELI summit. You can find the ELI Alumni Summit Report at arts.gov
One result of the ELI report is a new arts education grant category, for Collective Impact projects. This week, the NEA announced the first recipients of its brand new Collective Impact grants. Go to arts.gov to find out all about them.
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For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.